A Lover's Alibi
by fieldagent85
Summary: Lois, Chloe, and Lana offer Martha their friendship and sympathy following Jonathan’s death.


"Well, _somebody's _got to see how she's doing," Lois quipped, letting herself into the Kent home through the back door. "You can bet Clark isn't giving her the time of day."

Chloe and Lana followed warily, silently resolving to let Lois do all of the talking. It had been four days since Jonathan Kent's funeral, and his widow had yet to leave the farm once, prompting her surrogate daughter to stage an intervention of sorts.

"You don't feel like this is overstepping some sort of boundary?" Chloe questioned, as she and Lana dutifully followed Lois up the stairs.

Lois stopped, turning to face them with a confused frown. "Boundaries? Are you kidding me?" She shook her head, then continued up the stairs.

They walked down to the end of the upstairs hallway, to the bedroom Martha had shared with her husband until recently. They stood in a huddle outside the door, and waited for Lois to knock. "Mrs. Kent?"

Lois deemed the silence that followed a fair enough excuse to enter without knocking. She opened the door, and stepped inside, with Chloe and Lana poking their heads in uncertainly. Lois folded her arms across her chest as her jaw dropped slightly, surprised by the sight before her. Martha was scurrying back and forth from the closet to the bed, piling clothes into a large cardboard box, wearing only a white slip.

"Mrs. Kent…"

Martha glanced over at Lois, on her way back to the closet, and flashed her a casual smile, as if this were business as usual. "Hi, Lois. Chloe, Lana."

Lois stepped further into the room, allowing Chloe and Lana to enter fully as well. "What are you…up to?" Lois asked, attempting to feign nonchalance.

"Just doing some spring cleaning," Martha answered, grabbing a few of Jonathan's t-shirts out of the closet.

Lois raised a skeptical eyebrow. "It's January."

Martha didn't seem the least bit phased by the revelation. "Then I guess I'm getting a head start."

Lois eyed her suspiciously, then pushed the box over and sat on the edge of the better. Chloe and Lana followed suit, sitting on the end. When Martha walked back to the bed, a heap of clothes in her arms, she stopped short. "What? What's the matter?"

Lois smiled sadly. "You haven't left the farm in four days, Mrs. Kent. Not since the funeral."

Martha frowned, as if she didn't understand why that was so particularly noteworthy. Chloe elaborated, "We were worried about you."

"That's ridiculous," Martha replied, obviously putting on airs. "I'm fine. No need to worry."

The three girls simply stared back at her, obviously disbelieving. Their persistence somehow seemed to penetrate Martha's newly built wall and soon she was blinking back the tears that threatened to fall. "I'm…fine. Really, I…"

Lois stood suddenly, sensing a forthcoming flood of tears, and wrapped her arms around the woman who had become her surrogate mother in the last year and a half. With Lois's arms tightly around her, Martha began to shudder a little before allowing the tears to fall. Chloe and Lana sat still on the bed, riveted by the scene before them, afraid to breathe.

"It's okay, Mrs. Kent," Lois whispered soothingly. "It's all right." After a moment, she led Martha over to the bed, pushing the box to the ground to give her a place to sit, beside Chloe and Lana, who looked on sympathetically.

"I'm sorry," Martha said, quietly. "This is why I resigned myself to this little self-imposed exile. This is exactly what I was afraid of."

"It's okay to cry, Mrs. Kent," Lana offered. "I'd be worried if you didn't."

Lois nodded in agreement, with a small smile. "Cry 'til you're dry. We've got nowhere to be. Right, girls?" Lois questioned, staring down Chloe and Lana, who both instantly nodded.

Martha took a deep breath, a feeble attempt to compose herself. "I'm not sure any of this is ever going to feel real," she said, finally. "We'd come so close to losing him so many times, and now that's…happened, I just…I'd begun to think we were in the clear." Chloe reached over, squeezing her hand reassuringly. "Now all I have left is Clark. And this farm. I've never been alone before. Never. I went from my father's house straight to Jonathan's, with no detours. Now I'm alone, for the first time in my life."

"You're not alone, Mrs. Kent," Lois replied, fervently. "You have us. And Clark."

Martha tried to smile gratefully, but shook her head sadly. "I appreciate that, sweetheart. But when you're married to someone, and you become their other half, that's all you are when they're gone – half."

Chloe and Lana both looked away, unable to fathom such a deep, all-consuming love that left you feeling less than whole once it was gone. Lois, however, was too focused to relate Martha's words to her own life.

"You know, from the moment Jonathan carried me over the threshold of this house, I had been completely and utterly enamored with everything about married life. It took some time to learn how to be a wife, but once I did, that…that sense of being _needed_, for the first time…it was intoxicating. For years, it was just the two of us, isolated out here on this little farm. Hot summers, cold winters, venturing off the grounds only occasionally. But we never thought anything of it. All we could think about was…each other, corny as that sounds. It was everything." Martha paused, running her index finger under her left eye to wipe off any excess tears. "What do you do when that 'everything' is gone? I don't know. I don't know what to do when I roll over onto the other side of the bed, cold and empty. I don't know what to expect when I go out to the barn and call out to him, only to be answered by the echo of my own voice calling his name. Where do you go from there? All I can do is cry, but crying only makes it worse because there's no one there to comfort me anymore. That was _his_ job."

There was nothing the girls could say, and they knew this. There was not a single word in the English language fit to soothe Martha Kent in her grief. Lois kept her arm around her, while Chloe's hand tightly held hers, and Lana reached forward to place a steadying hand on her back. All three of them realized in that moment that not one of them had ever truly experienced this kind of loss in their lives. They had each known sorrow through tragedies with their parents as children, but even those terrible experiences could not compared with losing the person closest to you, after twenty-five years of devoting your entire life to him.

After a moment, Martha spoke again, to fill the silence that had been growing. "One day, you girls will experience a loss like this," she began slowly. "But be grateful. Sorrow this deep only comes with love that's deeper. And that's worth it."

Without moving, they all turned their thoughtful eyes away from her, each of them wordlessly hoping for the kind of love Jonathan and Martha Kent had known, each of them willing to endure the great loss and suffering that may come attached for that once in a lifetime chance at love that lasts.

-


End file.
